1. Field of the invention
This invention relates to methods of storing and accessing data on digital computers, and in particular, to an improved data base system for organizing large amounts of data for fast retrieval and processing.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Databases are used to store large amounts of data in digital computers. To analyze this data, users need to be able to identify sets of records based on a combination of attributes and generate summary information, such as sums, averages, and other statistical functions, for these sets.
Traditional databases may provide support for identifying some of these sets, but not all of them in an efficient manner. Multidimensional databases can provide fast access to more sets, for a small number of attributes. Even so, providing summary information on a set requires accessing all elements of that set, and is a time-consuming operation for large sets thereby delaying interactive queries for this information.
The following U.S. Patents disclose typical database management systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,554,631, entitled "Keyword Search Automatic Limiting Method." PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 4,606,002, entitled "B-Tree Structured Data Base Using Spare Array Bit Maps to Store Inverted Lists." PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 4,611,272, entitled "Key-Accessed File Organization." PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 4,468,728, entitled "Data Structure and Search Method for a Data Base Management System."